Reviews of One More Grain’s music tend to emphasise their outsider status, something that is both entirely literal – Daniel Patrick Quinn lives on the Isle of Lewis – but also a reflection of the identity of the band’s work, which defies categorisation and surprises in everything it does. ‘Modern Music’ is released with sparse accompanying information, so it is only an informed guess that it was made by Quinn (who is unmistakable), moonlighting academic Andrew Blick who provides and samples trumpet, Robin Blick (more brass? woodwind?) and Merek Cooper (percussion? guitar? both?). They were also behind previous installments in a rapidly recorded trilogy that also includes ‘Beans on Toast with Pythagoras’ (2022) and ‘One More Grain’ (2023).

Their identities may be obscure (although the band apparently used to have a LinkedIn page) but Quinn, laid out his remarkable story some years ago for The Quietus. In brief, David Thomas of Pere Ubu told him to get out of the music industry, so he moved to Java to study the gamelan. Now back on the margins of Britain, Quinn and friends have consistently produced music that sounds like everything else and nothing else, the product of a deeply original imagination. Other writers have reached for a remarkable range of comparison in an attempt to explain what OMG sound like – from Cornelius Cardew to Miles Davis, Aphex Twin to Fela Kuti. A host of names flitted through my head on first listening. The depth of the instrumentation on every track is a little like the tropical ambience of Jon Hassell, who Quinn greatly admires. The spoken-sung narratives which drift over shifting, uneasy soundscapes channel Mark E Smith, Ivor Cutler and Gordon Anderson. The air of musical eccentricity suggests Vivian Stanshall, the cut-and-paste reversed samples approach ‘The Who Sell Out’. The ten songs on ‘Modern Music’ are packed with a lifetime of listening, but not everyone hears what ‘One More Grain’ can hear. Their music is utterly absorbing, a complete world in itself. 

We are told that the album was recorded in “some shack on the edge of Oslo Airport” and in “a box room near Wick John O’Groats Airport that has been frequently attacked by a hostile herring gull during the mixing process.” The gull could well be a psychic manifestation. It is easy to believe that songs this layered, alluring and strange have powers beyond the ordinary. There is a strong sense of place throughout, as though we are listening in on a secret soundtrack, playing all around us if we can only tune in.

The far north and north-west of Scotland may seem empty at first glance, but this music teems with life, ideas, influences and cultures, which pop up in an entirely unpredictable manner. ‘Nature the Quarrier’ is narrated over a slinky, Afrobeat bassline and trumpet sample, making it the funkiest reflection on plant life to also include backing chants. It is mad and beautiful. ‘All My Desire (Return of the Alligator)’ combines an amusingly bouncy trumpet riff with the repeated declaration that “the wardens are trying to record the sky”. ‘Things Va’ features a lacy melody perhaps North African, picked out, maybe, on a mandolin. It is sometimes played backwards, and there is a trumpet voluntary, kettle drums and much else besides. Quinn discusses a sunset, stones and an island – location and time perfectly captured. 

At the centre of the album, ‘The Arcadian’ has Quinn experiencing an epiphany in his “cabin”, declaring “at first I saw it and now I am it, I am it”. With its stuttering bass, rambling brass figures and occasionally swelling sounds promises a big climax that never seems to come, like film music that has short-circuited. He is a lone seer, experiencing visions of life and death on the margins of society and the music business. OMG show little sign of breaking through into anything resembling wider recognition, but they really deserve an even slightly bigger audience. There is something mystical about the way Quinn and fellow musicians can express themselves so completely, while sounding only like themselves. There is no going back once you have listened to this.